Big Brother Is Watching YouTube

Isn’t it good to know that your government is keeping tabs on you by means of something called an Automated Targeting System, or ATS?

ATS is one big funky profiling system that profiles you as a terrorist based on a whole range of information about you gleaned from your flights in and out of the country. Let’s say you never get the pork for the in-flight meal. If you are always coming in from Tel Aviv, that might get you a low score. But if you are always flying in from Shiraz, Iran, that might dramatically raise your score. But if you are always also drinking the Shiraz, that might lower your score once more. And so on.

Fare Thee Well, in all your travels, and good luck on getting a low terrorist score! Remember it’s not personal – you’re being targeted by a heartless, mindless, soulless, automated data cranking system. What can go wrong?

But why should the government stop at collecting data about you from your flights in and out of the country? Well, I could tell you why, but it doesn’t matter – they WON’T stop! So let’s see what that will look like.

Fortunately my mathematics skills are still keen enough that I know exactly what it will look like. It will look like Netflix. Netflix’s founder Reed Hastings, who, like me and my homie Florence Nightingale, is/was also a mathematician, was just the other day telling Lesley Stahl how Netflix automatically knows how to recommend movies to you based on what you have already rented. I forget the exact words he used, but it boils down to this: the more you know about everybody, the more you know about anybody. The system simply learns what you will like from what the other clients currently like who have recently liked what you like now.

How will that work in practice? The government probably won’t mine Netflix’s data because it isn’t democratic enough. A potential domestic terrorist might not be willing to spend $5.99/month on DVDs when he could be using that money to stock up on fertilizer. Instead, our government will track things we get for free. Like YouTube videos.

Don’t kid yourself. All potential terrorists, even poor domestic terrorists nonfunded by foreign governments, enjoy YouTube. Because of that it will be very easy for Homeland Security to find terrorists by assembling a YouTube preferences terrorist score. In fact, it would be so easy they’re probably already doing it.

Think about it. If you think your personal iPod music list tells everybody everything they need to know about you, how much more will your YouTube video favorites do the trick? Just wait until Homeland Security’s computers get wind of your passion for 1930’s Soviet propaganda films featuring the Russian Internationale, with subtitles, or for 23-second clips of buskers in Budapest, annotated in Polish by someone who evidently speaks Polish but nevertheless chooses to call attention to her knowledge of English by calling herself tongue_lust.

What do you think it will mean to Homeland Security when their computer bank finds out you can’t resist scratchy videos of Uyghur lute players performing against backgrounds of Xinjiang Province landscapes? What it means depends on what all the other freaks out there with the exact same tastes do with their lives, and how often they get suspected of being a terrorist. If they (people you don’t know) are suspected of being terrorists, you will be too.

Here’s a stupid joke I just made up. How many Russians does it take to poison a light bulb? Answer: You are asking too many questions. Finish your soup!

Depending on whether you think my stupid joke is funny, the Bush administration can rate you on how trustworthy you are. It’s easy. I think my joke is a hoot, and the government knows I can’t be trusted. So if you like my joke, you can’t be trusted either.

Be beyond suspicion. Don’t do anything I would do.

Horsemeat and Other Indelicacies

Recently Andy Rooney started one of his 60 Minutes essays talking about spinach making people sick and ended with some observations having to do with the eating of horsemeat. I’m not actually sure what he was saying in-between because I was drowning his voice out with my screams. Later I spoke to Timothy “Perfess’r” Harris, our director, and asked him to shoot me if I ever wrote like that and he indicated that in that case I’d be shot about once every four weeks.

This may be one of those times. I’m high on NyQuil and I feel an irresistible urge to lead you all on a tour of my mind.

Speaking of tours, I was watching Rick Steves’ Europe the other day, and he was touring Turkey. While my eyes were watching, my mind was spinning with thoughts of cattle swimming the Bosporus, the cow jumping over the moon, and questions like, “If Turkey can be part of Europe, then why do we have wars, and why can’t we all have vacation property on Bora Bora?”

As my questions went unanswered I noticed that Rick Steves was playing backgammon with some Turkish people on the screen, and I listened long enough to hear him say that you can’t make a bad move in backgammon when playing the Turks, they won’t let you.

I immediately thought of Sudoku, to which I have lately become addicted. Sudoku isn’t remotely like backgammon, except that it’s a game. For the purposes of my immediate thought the only significant feature of Sudoku is that you do it by yourself. Therefore the great thing about doing Sudoku, the thing that makes it so appealing for me, is I don’t have to play it with some ego-crazed spoiled crybaby sitting across from me.

You see, I used to think that I might like to play chess. But I discovered that everyone within a radius of 3000 miles of me who was willing to join me at it was an ego-crazed spoiled crybaby. Thanks to Rick Steves I now know that I only had to move to Turkey to find people who could enjoy a friendly chess game like human beings. Provided I first hid their dice from them.

You may be wondering what any of this has to do with eating horsemeat. Well, one of Andy Rooney’s points, or pointlets, was that he was an American and Americans don’t eat horsemeat, and he, for one, wasn’t about to start.

Likewise, I would like to make a point, or pointlet, that I am an American, and that we Americans are by and large ego-crazed spoiled crybabies, and I, for one, have just about had it.

I’m not talking just about the lack of civil discourse evident during the current political campaigns, although that’s part of it. I’m talking about all the mean-spirited and uncivil and unsportsmanlike conduct that is revealing itself throughout our society at all levels, especially the highest, where it does the most monumental harm.

How can it be that I now have to write columns arguing against pre-emptive warfare and torture?

Last week George Bush signed the Military Commissions Act, which deprives almost all human rights to all non-Americans. It doesn’t prevent them from being tortured; it only requires torturers to avoid doing anything that might feel like organ failure or life threatening. So genital-electro-shock is out, thumbscrews are in.

The Act not only allows torture, it also lets the military tribunals use the evidence so obtained against the unlucky suspect. So if you are suspected of being a terrorist and they beat you or someone else into saying that you are a terrorist, then by the new rules, you’re a terrorist.

One of my former chess acquaintances made up the rule that he would always be White, because Black loses too much. I quit playing right about then. How soon before the rest of the world quits playing with America?

How long before the rest of the world catches on that our law treats them like dogs?

Men with Guns Shoot Man in Buns

I’m writing this on the morning of Sept. 11, 2006. Rudolph Giuliani is back on TV, this time to speak at a Ground Zero memorial ceremony. There’s no humor anywhere, life sucks, terrorists suck, and I have roughly 666 words in which to say something amusing.

OK, well. Speaking of tragedy, there’s a tragedy happening in slow motion in connection with court proceedings in El Paso that might have something to do with 9-11, but may still have funny bits in spite of that. I am speaking of the conviction and pending sentencing of two border patrol agents for shooting a drug smuggler in the butt and not reporting it, and the uproar over said conviction, etc. If nothing else I can say “butt” frequently.

Border agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean shot marijuana runner Osbaldo Aldrete-Davila in the butt as he fled from them, in February 2005. Since then Osbaldo Aldrete-Davila has filed a suit alleging violation of his civil rights and is asking $5 million. At the same time, even though Aldrete-Davila was found to have been hauling 800 pounds of marijuana when he was shot in the butt, he was granted full immunity to testify against the border agents, who were indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of assault with intent to commit murder, assault with serious bodily injury, and assault with a deadly weapon.

Ramos and Compean both said they thought Aldrete-Davila was armed that day. But the jury didn’t buy it. The jurors were probably more swayed by the fact that the two agents refused to write up the incident and destroyed evidence of the shooting, than by any testimony by the border-flaunting, marijuana-toting, $5 million-wanting, Rosa Parks-wanna-be, woundee.

I mean, if I were a juror in the case, when I learned that Ramos and Compean not only failed to report the shooting, but went so far as to retrieve and hide their shell-casings in order to cover the incident up, I would immediately have wanted them to spend life in prison, because I don’t think armed officers of the law should have a free pass to shoot people on holiday whenever they feel like it. You gotta do the paperwork, and THEN we look the other way.

In any case, a jury has spoken and Ramos and Compean were convicted months ago. The next step is sentencing, which is due to take place in El Paso in October. The slow-motion tragedy of which I spoke earlier is, however, happening right now in Washington, D.C.

Not only are the usual Republicans, such as James Sensenbrenner and John Hostettler, trying to meddle in the federal court’s business in this case, but also so is good old Democrat Dianne Feinstein. They are all asking Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to order the case be reopened and re-prosecuted because they already don’t like the way it turned out, even before allowing the sentences to be read.

You can go to justicefortheborderpatrol.com and sign their petition if you think it’s a good idea. I won’t. It looks to me like they want Bush to assign a new prosecutor in the case now, and then again in the future, and then again, until a prosecutor can be found that doesn’t bring charges, because Sensenbrenner, Feinstein, and the others have decided that if guys with badges can’t shoot Mexicans in the butt without anyone knowing, then the terrorists have won.

What really has the conservatives’ panties in a bunch is that the woundee and undoubted felon Aldrete-Davila got full immunity to testify against two white-hatted good guys, and they RIGHTFULLY see this as a travesty of justice.

It IS a travesty of justice when the bad guys get immunity to testify against good guys. But if you’re going to end that practice just for federal agents, we’re going to be stuck with two separate justice systems, one for liars with badges, and one for all the rest of us. That would be the tragedy.

Comedy of Terrors

I’m writing this the morning of Aug. 7, 61 years and more than a day after the dropping of “Little Boy” on Hiroshima. That event, in juxtaposition with recent history, no longer has the power to surprise me.

Consider this stupid quote from Osama bin Laden: “As I watched [in the eighties] the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me [to] punish the unjust the same way [and] to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women.” So the destruction of towers of Lebanon inspired him to want to destroy the World Trade Towers... to start killing... so that we will be inspired to... STOP killing? Why does he think we are so different from him?

Oh, right. He thinks we’re different from him because he hears us telling ourselves so. He’s a terrorist. He targets civilians cheaply using our own overgrown commercial airlines against us. We are not terrorists. We are noble soldiers who have earnestly invested some of our unique vast hoards to amass expensive precision war machines so that we can kill only combatants, except of course when civilians accidentally get in the way, which of course they always do, saddening us always.

CNN says this morning that so far, on this 27th day of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, there have been 95 Israeli deaths, including 35 civilians, and 716 Lebanese deaths, mostly civilians. We are saddened by every one of those deaths, just as we are saddened by the non-terrorist unfortunate deaths of Hiroshima victims who got in the way of our non-terrorist justified war weapon which we dropped on them. Collateral damage is a bitch.

Some of you are probably thinking right now that I’m anti-Israel in all this mess and I want Israel to roll over and let Hezbollah annihilate it. I don’t want that at all. But before I discuss that, I want to talk about my favorite Shakespearean tragedy.

My favorite Shakespearean tragedy is the play I call Mercutio, a Tragedy of About Six Scenes Cobbled Together from Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare. I call the whole play, Romeo and Juliet, A Comedy. What else can you call it when the so-called hero and hero-whine are candidates for the top Darwin Awards of their century?

How is “melancholy” Romeo, “Montague’s only son,” a tragic hero? What heroic stature does he have at the outset of the conflict? He is heroically melancholy? He is heroically hard up? He is heroically able to ponce around with a sword and pretend he knows how to use it? He is, heroically, a stupid fish? How do we pin down this guy’s tragic flaw? The same way we pin down Juliet’s tragic flaw — we lock them both together in a crypt without any air holes and wave generally in the direction of it. Oh, look now! We don’t have to; they’ve killed themselves with their mutual shared stupidity, saving us the trouble. There are your tragic flaws; they’re both perfectly dead, thus imperfectly alive.

Meanwhile, Mercutio has three things going for him. 1) He actually can use the sword, although nobody’s perfect, especially when Romeo’s on the team. 2) He actually has a brain and sense. 3) He knows they’re all ludicrous, and he has a heroic gift for saying so.

We have no trouble finding Mercutio’s fatal tragic flaw. In spite of knowing what I know, namely that Romeo is a fish (“... flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified!” —Mercutio to Romeo), in spite of correctly deducing that Romeo is a madman, Mercutio remains faithful to his crazy stupid friend until his very end when he is stuck, thanks to help from the very same stupid friend he is faithful to.

So where was I? I was going to say I can’t turn my back on stupid humans either. But I can still call down a pox on all their houses anyway.

I hope that makes sense to someone.

Damned If You Don’t

Recently I set forth what I thought was a leading-edge new legal theory, namely that everything which introduces discomfort, whether physical or psychological, to me, Dr. Wes Browning, should be, and in fact already is, illegal.

Now I feel hopelessly outclassed by Afghanistan clerics calling for the death penalty for Abdul Rahman, the fellow who allegedly converted to Christianity from Islam 16 years ago. The clerics’ theory goes way beyond anything I had thought to propose. They don’t just want to execute those who are openly apostate, people who thereby directly visit psychological discomfort upon the clerics. They also want to execute those who are “outed” as having been closet apostates, for, if I’ve got my English tense straight, having potentially have might had brought psychological discomfort upon them.

Let me try that again. The man had been apostate in secret for 16 years, and then was exposed by in-laws. From my silly Western point of view, I would have thought that the in-laws were the ones who would be charged with causing the discomfort, but that just goes to show how dismally non-multiculturalized I am.

No, the real affront was Abdul Rahman’s hidden affront to the very fabric of space and time for secretly switching religions in mid-life and then enabling in-laws to find out about it and tell people. Why, someone could have been hurt all this time.

“Quick,” they seem to be saying, “someone hang Abdul right now because at any time in the last 16 years he might have ridden into Jerusalem or Kabul or Mazar-e-Sharif on a donkey, started sermonizing, and forced us to have previously gotten New Testamenty on his wrists and ankles.”

I’m sure the parallel to the Zacarias Moussaoui case has by now struck some of you. Moussaoui, of course, is being tried for the opposite, for not having done what he might have done, namely to have admitted to not taken part in 9-11, prior to its happening, in order that it could not have happened. I mean, when he was jailed before 9-11, he was supposed to have told the FBI, before 9-11 happened, that it would happen. Not the day, the event. So that it wouldn’t have happened.

It makes perfect sense to me, and I want to see these principles extended further. We need to prosecute more people for what they might potentially have done. I believe that is in fact the original meaning of the Latin “pro secute” – secute them before they secute you.

Hey, secute them even if they never secute you, but could have, if you had let them, or if they weren’t too afraid of you to.

Now the prosecutor in Afghanistan is spoiling the whole thing by trying to let Abdul off for having converted while not in his right mind. I was hoping that at the very least the clerics would offer to bless Abdul’s soul and commit it to Heaven just before beheading him, provided that he recanted his conversion and denounced Satan and Christianity. But I guess I can’t expect the Spanish Inquisition.

Still, as of this writing, the situation is salvageable. There are reports of “hundreds” of Muslim protestors in Afghanistan protesting the possible impending release of Mr. Rahman, on the grounds that to release him would make Islam look bad. Maybe they could hang the prosecutor for having had possibly released him last week, when he didn’t. In so doing they might save Islam at the last minute from the international disgrace of having shown tolerance.

Or, they could not hang the prosecutor, and say that they might have, and give themselves points for having potentially done it. Then 16 years from now, they could do it anyway, and say they’d done it all along, “in their hearts,” where it counts.

Maybe the protestors are trying to do Christianity a favor. After all, there probably wouldn’t be a Christianity today if Pontius Pilate had granted an insanity plea.

You're Thinking Too much

Remember Ian Spiers? He was the Scots-African-American who last year chose to take photographs of the beautiful Hiram Chittenden Locks in his neighborhood just like he’d seen all the tourists do for the decade or so since he’d been living nearby. Only Mr. Spiers wasn’t made to feel welcome. Instead he was greeted by police who demanded to see ID, not once but repeatedly. In one case federal agents even showed up at his home to lecture Mr. Spiers about 9-11 and to make him feel like a criminal.

Well, just when we thought all that was behind us, the U.S. Attorney’s Office issued a new warning last week that "it is crucial that police, fire and emergency medical personnel take notice of their surroundings, and be aware of 'vagrants' who seem out of place or unfamiliar." This warning was in part prompted by the discovery in Somerville, Massachusetts, of a homeless man with an expired Yemen passport, who was doing nothing illegal and who was not a terrorist.

Let me explain that again. I’m sure most of you out there have working neurons taking up valuable space in your heads, so that what I’ve said here so far may not have sunk in for you the way it would have done if your brain was made of chocolate pudding.

Pay close attention now. A MAN was found in OUR country guilty of NOT being a terrorist and of being ACTUALLY homeless and from Yemen, another country. This led OUR government to conclude that there might be other non-terrorists who are homeless and from Yemen, RIGHT?

NO! From that they concluded that we have to be more afraid of terrorists POSING as terrorists. We’ve already seen one person NOT DO THAT, in Somerville, so we must be more vigilant than ever.

You know, by concentrating really hard, and by taking lots of illegal pills and funny mushrooms, and drinking a whole bottle of Jack Daniels, I bet I could work for Homeland Security, too. Let me crank up my natural paranoia and see how that would work.

Seriously, I think I speak for everyone in the homeless community when I say the U.S. Attorney’s Office hasn’t gone far enough. We need to really be on the safe side and think of how else terrorists might effectively disguise themselves. Gee, if I were a terrorist I would want to be able to go anywhere I want and rarely be suspected of any wrongdoing, or, if suspected, be able to easily brush the suspicions aside.

I could pose as police, fire, or emergency medical personnel, couldn’t I? Yes! Our police should be on the alert for our other police! Our firemen should be suspicious of each other! We should run away from ambulance drivers; they may have bombs!

I know, a lot of you are probably saying, “Wes, you’re being silly. No ambulance driver has ever been found with a bomb in this country.” Precisely! The terrorists knew that’s what you were going to think and they’re using that! THEY’RE USING YOUR NEURONS, MAN.

It’s because you have a brain that they can get you. The terrorists do the opposite of everything that makes sense, and they use the sense that you make against you! (I want Dennis Hopper to play me in the movie version of this column.)

All the homeless people in this country are under suspicion all the time! That’s precisely why the terrorists will pretend to be homeless, because you won’t suspect the people you already suspected! Our government is full of geniuses. I know it because they came up with this.

What you’ve got to do is stop thinking. If you stop thinking the terrorists can’t get you. Our government destroys reason to protect us. We are better off when we do what they say and be stupid, because that’s the last thing the terrorists will expect from us.

Remember, 2+2=5. Non-thinking is Safe-thinking. Take your pills.

Read About Sex Here

If you're like me (and pray to your favorite power source you aren't) you like to sit all day. And when you sit all day staring at a computer, like I do, you get tired of it just sitting there staring back at you with the same cute kitty picture in the background, or whatever. So you push buttons and try to make the screen do stuff.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that one of the things I make my computer do is fetch news stories for me. This is how I, a man who hates to leave his chair even to collect free food, came to know a while back that a rooster in a town in New Zealand was suspected of carrying a bomb. I did not go to New Zealand. I simply read about it in a newspaper story, which I found on-line. I think I had googled "New Zealand terrorist chickens" during an extreme boredom fit. Or some such thing. ("To google" = "to use the Google internet search engine.")

This morning I did something similar. I tried to google "Downing St. Memo." I expected that a story of the magnitude of the Downing St. Memo story had been written up thousands of times, as would be revealed when I searched Google News from among their more than 4000 news sources. But only 27 stories popped up.

Let's put that into perspective. It has been less than a day since Russell Crowe threw a phone at some guy, and the story of his arrest has already appeared in over 300 news outlets.

So, I thought, maybe I'm asking for the wrong thing. The Downing St. Memo isn't really a memo at all, I thought. It's actually the official British Government minutes of a secret July 2002 British Government meeting called to discuss secret talks between a British representative and the Bush Administration in April of that year, concerning Bush war plans for Iraq, proving that he lied for months to the American people about his intentions, I thought. So I should drop the word "memo" and add the word "minutes", and google the phrase "Downing St. Minutes."

For just a few seconds it looked as though I was making progress! Instead of only 27 stories I found a whopping whole 49! A stunning improvement! Then I looked at what stories I really got and found that all of the new stories I had picked up were sports stories and one from something called "Boston's Weekly Dig" which had an article on 74 Things to Do This Summer. Number one: "Get drunk at Fenway Park." The word "downing" appeared in a passage that discussed the possibility of downing gallons of cocktails in the company of hairy gay men, the event described as "running with the bears." "Minutes" referred to minutes on a ferry boat ride, presumably also spent getting drunk.

OK, eventually Anitra "born to google" Freeman showed me that I needed to spell out "Street," finally getting me just under 500 hits. But, this is for a story that's had over a month to spread.

Googling "Michael Jackson trial" netted 13,300 hits! Even a story as recent as the coming out of Deep Throat got me over 5000 hits, and that's after googling "Mark Felt Deep Throat," rather than just "Deep Throat."

What does it take to get the world's press to take a story seriously? Evidently only six things matter: Sex, booze, sex, celebrities, drugs, and sex. Michael Jackson's trial has at least five of them. The Russell Crowe story has two of them (if he wasn't drunk that would be news), while writing about the Deep Throat story confers license to write "Deep Throat" over and over again, so there's your sex, sex, sex.

Question: Why does everybody know about Abu Graib and almost nobody knows about the Downing St. Memo? Answer: No one was naked at the Downing St. meeting.

There's Always One In Every Decision

RANT ALERT!

The good news: a panel of the 2nd US Court of Appeals finally, FINALLY, told the Bush administration that simply declaring someone an "enemy combatant" did not provide them with an excuse to deny that person a lawyer or rights to a trial. The bad news: it isn't over.

Jose Padilla, a US citizen, was arrested in Chicago in May 2002 and has been held in a navy brig in South Carolina for a year and a half. He hasn't been allowed to see his lawyers. Although the government has said that Padilla was involved in a dirty bomb terrorist plot he hasn't been charged with a crime in any court of law. The view of the government is that they didn't even have to say what he was supposed to be guilty of, it was enough for them to declare that Mr. Padilla was an "enemy combatant" to detain him in the brig FOR LIFE in ISOLATION if they wanted to do so.

Bush's people still think that's the way it should work and will probably appeal. They are no doubt encouraged by the fact that one member of the 3 judge panel actually sided with them. The idea of the dissenting opinion was that the president needs the power to detain people who may be a threat to the public.

Let's reflect on that dissenting opinion to get a clear idea in our own minds as to what a screaming imbecile that one lame judge is.

The man has been detained for one and a half years. The immediate threat is over. HE'S IN THE BRIG. He's detained already. The issue isn't the detention. His arrest was proper. The issue is, once you've got him, YOU STILL HAVE TO LET HIM SEE A LAWYER AND TRY HIM AND LET HIM GO IF HE TURNS OUT TO BE INNOCENT.

And oh yes, the Bush Administration has had A YEAR AND A HALF to do that. Did I make that clear enough? A friggin YEAR AND A HALF.

Here is a personal note for that one lame judge: * Guess what? I think you're a threat to the American people. Good thing I'm not the president or I might declare your ass enemy combatant material and put you in isolation for, oh I don't know, how about for YEAR AND A HALF?! * -- Ha, ha, just kidding -- Dr. Wes.

Speaking of South Carolina, that was where police stormed a school recently and searched a hundred students for illegal drugs, some of them at gunpoint, because their principal thought it would be swell. What we have here is another threat to the American people. There are getting to be too many of these.

I don't expect the police to know or understand the constitution. That would be dreaming. But is it asking too much for a school principal to have read it with comprehension?

What part of the Fourth Amendment does that principal not grasp, I wonder? Was it the part about "the right of the people to be secure… against unreasonable searches?" Was he not aware that minors also constitute people? Was it the part about how search warrants were required to be specific? How specific is searching every kid in a school hallway whether they have done anything suspicious or not just because a crime may or may not have at one time occurred in that hallway days or weeks earlier by completely different people?

Here's another one, folks. Say you're on vacation in Guadalajara, Mexico, and our government, or some imbecile in it, decides they want to incarcerate you for life without charges or a hearing. Here's how they could do that. They would seize you in Mexico without clearance from the Mexican authorities. Then, they would take you to Guantanamo Base ("Gitmo") and imprison you with all the Taliban, as an "enemy combatant" (It doesn't matter if you are or not, they don't have to prove that part. They just have to declare it.)

Gitmo, a secure US military enclave, isn't really America, so all that constitution BS doesn't apply. -- that's the essence of our government's actual legal position as they fight for that power to the Supreme Court. What a crock.

No Shortage of Scapegoats

I have a real challenge this time. It has been suggested by none other than our Production Manager and writer Molly "What's That Accent?" Rhodes that I talk here today about those attacks on homeless people that occurred in Cleveland about three weeks ago.

Molly reported on those attacks in our North American Newsbriefs last issue. Four kids, aged 16-19, videotaped themselves using a stun gun to paralyze sleeping homeless people. They then urinated upon them, among other things. How funny is that? Not very.

It's even less funny than we reported. For instance the authorities only charged the kids with misdemeanor assault charges. That in spite of the fact that they attacked at least six people with the stun gun and at least one person was also struck on the head with a rock. This was a terrorist attack on people who were sleeping, who were harming no one.

Even less funny: three days after the kids were caught and the story was all over the Cleveland news a radio co-host at Extreme Radio WXTM/92.3 FM in Cleveland went to the site of the attacks and exploited homeless people à la "Bum Fights" by offering them $10 and free pizza to be shocked with a stun gun. Three let themselves be shocked and ten more were desperate enough to get in line for it, and the majority of callers to the show thought it was funny, according to the other co-host.

Last night fellow editor and writer babe Anitra Freeman was riding a bus and wished to enter a conversation but for the first time in possibly years she was unable to butt in, because the people talking were so engaged. What stirred their passions so much? They were convinced America was headed toward fascism and there was no stopping it.

There sure are a lot of the signs. I see three sides of fascism coming into place. On the one side you have a government that only cares about you if you are a corporation. That's your basic idea of fascism, government for the corporations. Mussolini really promoted the hell out of that aspect of it.

You also have the side represented by these four teenagers in Cleveland. These aren't rich kids we're talking about. They lived in a slum. They may have been nearly as poor as the people they attacked.

Did you all read very carefully what we wrote about Lyndon LaRouche's campaign? Polly Keary wrote: [LaRouche] wants to create an "International Youth Movement" in order to build "a large cadre of deployable youth" to reverse what he calls a decadent Baby Boomer culture.

Well isn't that special? Can you say, Brownshirts? So it will be Baby Boomers this time, instead of Jews? How pluralistic of him.

This country is full of recruits for the new Brownshirts. There are plenty of poor desperate youth ready to believe any message scapegoating any segment of society. Why not Baby Boomers? The media has already convinced everybody that Baby Boomers invented decadence. Never mind that there's plenty of decadence to go around in every generation and that the Boomers just got the big spotlight on them. That's what they get for growing up during the rise of mass media and television.

And of course, why not homeless people? Hell a lot of them are the same people anyway. Besides they're easy to find, and if you get them with a stun gun while they're sleeping they can't fight back, unlike some of those nasty Baby Boomers who have money and lawyers.

Where was I? Oh yes, I've been witnessing the rise of three sides to fascism. The third: the glorification of the masses. You have to convince the majority that they are superior to the scapegoated minorities. Let's see, the masses are Christian, let's pander to that.

Who will put these ingredients together and do to America what Hitler did to Germany? Does Bush have the charisma? Is LaRouche too sidelined? Stay tuned.